Comparative Literary Analysis of The Rocking-horse Winner and The Painted Door

One thing that everyone has in common is the need for human compassion. People need other people to interact with, so when loved ones deny them this entitlement it can be devastating. People from all lifestyles are victims to this type of emotional abandonment, but different people react differently. It is because this feeling is common to all of us that writers often exploit it in literature. This is the case in the two stories studied here. In D.H. Lawrence’s famous short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” a mother emotionally abandons her son, Paul, causing him to seek his mother’s love and approval. In the short story “The Painted Door,” by Sinclair Ross, a farmer, John, estranges his wife, named Ann, during a snowstorm, causing Ann to re-evaluate their roles in the relationship. While both “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The Painted Door” feature a character estranged by their loved one, Paul tries to win his mother’s love in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” while Ann blames John and betrays him in “The Painted Door.”

The relationship between Paul and his mother is not one of mutual compassion. Paul wants his mother’s love but she responds only with a cold indifference. At the start of “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” Lawrence describes the mother’s cold feeling towards her children saying, “she felt [the children] had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them . . . Everybody else said of her: ‘She is such a good mother. She adores her children.’ Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so” (Lawrence 307). The mother does not love her children like a mother should, and this is emotionally damaging to them. Moreover, the children want her to love them. The boy, Paul, wants his mother’s attention, but the mother blames their woes on the family’s lack of money, and the father’s lack of luck. In order to win his mother’s love, Paul tries to prove he is lucky. While talking to his mother, Paul asserts his luckiness, but he “saw she did not believe him; or rather, that she paid no attention to his assertion. This angered him somewhere, and made him want to compel her attention” (Lawrence 309). Paul feels the mother is abandoning him, and he wants to win her back by becoming lucky in order to “compel her attention.” Further, not only does this compulsion for attention drive him to be lucky, but also drives him to try to replace his father’s role as the breadwinner in the house, by becoming lucky. In order to make money, he decides to bet in horse races. He finds the luck he needs by riding his rocking-horse in hopes the winner will come to him:

He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it. When the two girls were playing dolls in the nursery, he would sit on his big rocking-horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily. Widely the horse careered, the waving dark hair of the boy tossed, his eyes had a strange glare in them. The little girls dared not speak to him.

When he had ridden to the end of his mad little journey, he climbed down and stood in front of his rocking-horse, staring fixedly into its lowered face. Its red mouth was slightly open, its big eye was wide and glassy-bright. (Lawrence 309)

Lawrence, being no stranger to sexuality, is using the secretive and rhythmic motion of the rocking-horse in this excerpt as a symbol for masturbation. While the child is not literally masturbating, it is a symbol for a stand-in for copulation with his mother. Lawrence wrote the story not long after Sigmund Freud published his work on the Oedipus complex, so Lawrence was likely exposed to the concept that boys want to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers. While this is not a literal interpretation of the story, it more clearly shows Paul’s internal motive to win his mother’s love by replacing his father by being lucky.

Conversely, in “The Painted Door,” Ross conveys a wife’s feeling of contempt for her husband, rather than a mother-son relationship. Despite having a slightly different family dynamic, “The Painted Door” still conveys similar thematic-topics of abandonment, alienation and surrogates for love. In Ross’ short story, the protagonist Ann feels as though her husband John is abandoning her. At the start of the story, John first decides to leave Ann at home while he checks on his father in a storm; Ann protests though, saying, “It isn’t right to leave me here alone. Surely I’m as important as your father” (Ross 1). Ann feels as though John, similar to the way the Paul’s mother abandons him, is abandoning her. She feels emotionally detached from her husband. Unlike in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” though, Ann feels resentment towards her husband rather than a need to prove herself. Rather than seek John’s approval she rebels against him. While thinking about her current woes, Ann resents John for his lack of adventure and his frugalness, recalling:

By dint of his drudgery he saved a few months' wages, added a few dollars more each fall to his payments on the mortgage; but the only real difference that it all made was to deprive her of his companionship, to make him a little duller, older, uglier than he might otherwise have been . . . They were useless thoughts. She knew. It was his very devotion that made them useless, that forbade her to rebel (Ross 3 - 4).

Rather than having the drive to win John’s love as Paul does with his mother, Ann is motivated to betray John because of his emotional estrangement of her. Additionally, Ann too uses a surrogate for her lack of companionship, but a real one rather than a mere symbol. When John leaves to help his father, he invites their neighbor, Steven, over to keep Ann’s company. When Steven comes over, Ann compares him to John remarking, “He was erect, tall, square-shouldered. His hair was dark and trim, his young lips curved soft and full. While John, she made to comparison swiftly, was thickset, heavy-jowled, and stooped” (Ross 7). Ann sees Steven as a replacement for John, as a better and more adventurous John. Ann rebels against John’s alienation of her by consummating her short relationship with Steven.

Both authors center the plots of their stories on one character alienating another. In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” Paul’s mother abandons him emotionally. She alienates him and cannot love him. Similarly, John both physically and emotionally abandons Ann. There is a difference in motive though. While Paul’s mother does not love him because she feels she did not ask to be a mother, John abandons Ann because he is simply oblivious to her needs, but he does still care for her. This alienation affects both Paul and Ann, and they use it as their motivator for their subsequent actions. Paul is compelled to win his mother’s love by giving her what he thinks she wants most: money. Paul starts a fund for his mother to give her one thousand dollars a year for five years, but when asked to give it to her all at once he replies, “Oh, let her have it, then! We can get some more” (Lawrence 315). Paul giving his mother all the money at once despite his plan shows that he is willing to do anything to win his mother's affection. Unlike Paul, Ann does not wish to win over John’s affection. She instead blames John’s hard work and steadfastness for their problems. Ross explains Ann’s needs saying, “It was something of life she wanted, not just a house or furniture; something of John, not pretty clothes when she would be too old to wear them. But John of course couldn’t understand. To him it seemed only right that she should have the clothes -- only right that he, fit for nothing else, should slave away fifteen hours a day to give them to her” (Ross 3). Unlike Paul, Ann decides to reciprocate this lack of affection by betraying John.

The devastation brought on by the lack of love and affection can deeply hurt anyone. Both Sinclair Ross’ “The Painted Door” and D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” display this pain through their protagonists Ann and Paul. While Ann blames the lack of affection from her husband on the fact that her husband is overworked, Paul seeks to win his mother’s love by replacing his father as the breadwinner. Both Ann and Paul feel alienated by a loved one; Paul through his lack of love from his mother, and Ann by her husband’s physical and emotional abandonment of her. Paul works to prove his luck to his mother, and tries to win money to buy his mother’s love. However, while Ann does seek affection from her husband, she simply resents him for their problems and then betrays him by cheating on him with the neighbor. Both Paul and Ann use surrogates to mend their lack of affection from their loved one. Lawrence uses a sexualized description of a rocking-horse to show Paul’s lust for maternal affection. Ann similarly uses Steven as John’s stand-in; he is a better, more handsome and caring John. Both stories use a very similar device to tell their story: one character abandons or otherwise alienates another, which causes the abandoned character to find affection elsewhere, ultimately causing tragedy. Using abandonment and alienation in both short stories, the authors are able to connect with the reader on an emotional level, and allow the reader to connect to the characters in a way they otherwise would not be able.